The Inconvenience Fairy

During the beta for Final Fantasy XI, we felt the exquisite new pleasures that had been designed by SquareSoft. Yes, it’s pretty much an MMORPG, no, aside from fantastic art direction there isn’t all that much to distinguish it, but as I said in a related post I play these games basically as a way to hang out. Once I learned that

your starting server is completely random,

that people must earn money in game to bring friends to their server by buying a World Pass,

that the amount of money you need to earn depends on how populated your server is,

that they aren’t opening any new servers for the US launch which will inflate the price across the board,

and that even once you do get a World Pass from a friend it doesn’t let you bring an existing character, you have to create a new one who won’t be of comparable level to the person that brought you over there in the first fucking place,

the whole thing is stupid and I’m not their accountant, they can come up with some other way to load balance their servers if we’re going to pay thirteen dollars a month for the privilege of frustration.

The US release apparently allows you to bring five people over instead of the original one, which doesn’t really fix the problem - it just downgrades it from “absolutely insane” to “pretty ridiculous.” In our rage, we even produced a comic on the subject. If I wanted to play with myself, I have a game that doesn’t cost anything.

The thing is, at this very moment and realistically up until next year I don’t have to put up with decisions like that. Have you looked at the Goddamn release list for the next seven days? The new Tony Hawk hits, kill.switch, Gladius, Top Spin, Rainbow Six 3, um… Quidditch, Call of Duty, Thief III, Fire Emblem, and God knows what else. I don’t have to tolerate things like World Passes if I don’t want to. I can simply amuse myself with the eruption of holiday titles and someone else can maintain the price of SquareEnix stock.

I was up pretty late playing Rainbow Six 3 last night, I’ll post what I have here so far and then immediately start writing about R6.